For a long time Henry Moore was the only twentieth century British artist—let alone British sculptor—with true international currency. Not only was he current, he seemed omnipresent. Every public plaza, lawn, or open space seemed to have its own Moore, mostly courtesy of the British Council, gracefully recumbent as a sign of culture with a capital “C.” This situation, one might argue, did Moore few favors. As a “key component of corporate and state landscapes,” according to the editors of this innovative and extremely useful volume, Moore's sculpture folded into a safe, corporate blandness, “sustaining a notion of a comfortable, easily understood, modern art” (1). When this was linked up to a rather limp and exclusionary notion of “Englishness” it was easy to dismiss Moore as the artistic equivalent of the postwar “New Towns” (the sites of many of his sculptures), an insipid amalgam of tradition and modernity that neglected the real complexities of British culture and twentieth-century art. If those complexities were somehow perceived to be nonetheless there, then Moore and his sculpture seemed to figure only as symptom and never as analysis.

Building on a stimulating conference held at the University of East Anglia in 1998, the editors of Henry Moore: Critical Essays have marshaled an impressive lineup of established and younger scholars who present a darker and more complex Moore than this bland public figure implies. In addition to an unusually helpful introduction, which sets Moore and his reputation lucidly in context, eleven essays span the years from 1930 to the 1980s and topics from Moore in French periodicals in the 1930s (Julia Kelly) and Moore in Polish art criticism after 1945 (Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius) to the Atom Piece for the University of Chicago (dealt with by both Iain A. Boal and Chris Stephens) and a discussion by the artist Susan Hiller on the legacy of the “truth to material” aesthetic. As some of these subjects suggest, the international character of the contributors’ list helps to expand the interest of the volume beyond the concerns of “British art studies” in a stimulating way. What emerges is a view of Moore that thankfully puts away hagiography and that goes well beyond the conventional tendency to “maroon” him so that he is “rarely positioned in relation to anything other than himself” (2). Moore is here located within history and culture but also seems newly rich and complex as artist.

The most striking contributions focus on placing Moore in unfamiliar contexts. Andrew Causey looks closely at the Shelter drawings within a broader context of Moore's graphic work in the late 1930s and 1940s and notes the importance of “drawing in relation to sculpture” at that moment “that did not exist at other times” (81). Building on Sigmund Freud's essay on the uncanny, Causey is able to make a series of observations about the priority of drawing and sculpture—a shift from “drawing for sculpture to drawing after it” (87)—doubling and defamiliarization that ends by placing the Shelter drawings of 1940–41 in a new and illuminating context. In a related vein, Lyndsey Stonebridge, in a compelling essay, interweaves the Second World War, uncanniness and defamiliarization, and contemporary psychoanalysis to produce some powerfully original readings of some drawings of the 1940s, arguing that “many of Moore's pre-history figments—phallic objects in barren landscapes; caves; wombs; tombs—echo the sort of symbolic spaces where psychoanalysis finds itself … home from home” (115). Both of these essays on uncanniness have the additional advantage of bringing Moore closer to the concerns of international surrealism than he is normally allowed to be.

A cluster of essays takes up the theme of the “Englishness” of the visual arts at this period. Russell and Penelope Curtis offer a precise and subtle account of Moore's relation with the English landscape in the 1930s. Concentrating on the iconic sites of the parish church, the garden, and the moor, they define two “modes” of Moore's sculpture in landscape: one can be accommodated to a view of Englishness and the nation that prizes harmony, inte gration, and evacuation from “the landscape of its historical uneasiness and particularity,” while the other, “overtly prehistoric,” destabilizes integrative readings of the land and the nation and “gathers up our fears within its frame” (140). Robert Burstow supplements this view with an account of Moore and the “open-air” exhibition of sculpture. Burstow helpfully situates this mode of display in the context of a widespread desire to offset the pollution-ridden industrial landscapes of Moore's native South Yorkshire with other, more healthful, open-air versions of Englishness and landscape. Jon Wood and Margaret Garlake offer stimulating discussions also, although more obliquely, related to the national theme, with Wood providing a scholarly account of Moore's studio homes of 1926–46, and Garlake looking at the architectural commissions of 1938–58 to detect eclectic shifts in artistic identity in Moore's work.

Defining the project of their book, the editors claim that the collected essays “offer readings of the diverse historical, economic and cultural conditions in which Moore's sculpture was produced and circulated and … consider the kinds of ideological work which the sculptural pieces perform” (2). This is to undersell the achievement of the volume. The essays do impressively fulfill this claim, but many of them also, and most fascinatingly, provide new interpretative and aesthetic perspectives on Moore's sculpture. It emerges from this book, richer and less stable than conventional readings and conventional historical understandings have allowed it to be. This is a book that anyone engaged with Moore or with British culture of the twentieth century will find of interest.